Gamification has been defined as the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in non-game contexts. It is frequently employed to improve customer retention and encourage desired user interactions with web-based enterprises by incenting users to achieve specific tasks or actions with publicly-visible or financially-beneficial forms of recognition such as points, badges, or digital currencies. Human predilections for achievement, status, and competition help drive the desired behaviors. Some examples of gamified behavior include: badge systems and leaderboards tied to user product views, point systems tied to a user's promotion of products on social networks, and level systems for employees who achieve task milestones in the workplace.
An industry dedicated to implementing gamification techniques for enterprise customers has begun to develop in recent years and a number of firms advertise an ability to generically gamify nearly every aspect of a user's experience with any given web site. These “gamification engines” allow an enterprise customer to, among other things, build leaderboards, specify what user website interactions deserve incentives, specify what and how much they receive for incentivized actions, and dictate the timeframe over which incentives are valid. These customizations are usually exposed via an application programming interface (API) that allows web developers to link the gamification engine with the underlying code of the host site.
A problem with existing gamification engines is that the possible “game” components incorporated into the host site can hardly be classified as anything resembling a game; rather, they might better be described as competitive loyalty points. Users are not engaged in a manner that encourages creative thinking nor are they encouraged to engage with a system that rewards tasks of ever increasing difficulty; instead, the user is induced to complete mindless tasks such as viewing an item, “liking” an item on Facebook, forwarding a link of the item to their friends, visiting specific regions of a site, or any number of similarly tedious actions that are useful to owners of the host site but otherwise reduce the user to completing tasks in a manner akin to a rat pressing a lever for treats. Introducing a public accounting of the points acquired performing such actions may activate competitive instincts that briefly encourage desired consumer behaviors but, ultimately, the lack of any need for skill will result in users losing interest.